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Gibraltar is just displacement activity for Spain

Normally Spanish late night television is like Hello magazine in debate form. A group of journalists sit around and shout at each other about which Matador is dating which model. It’s light it’s fluffy and it goes on for hours.

Last week though it was all a little different as the debate turned from Spain’s equivalent of Katy Price to a large inhabited rock at the very tip of the country. In the UK the story of Gibraltar has been covered with a hint of incredulity and as the situation in Syria intensifies is less often in the news. But Spanish media continue to cover it, and with increasing levels of belligerence.

As an example in the four days up to August 28th Spanish television channel Telecinco, always slightly right leaning perhaps, had covered the story in its news coverage no less than 8 times. It’s got the attention of the Spanish populace in a way that it never has in the UK.

However almost everyone you speak to in the Spanish capital knows it’s all a smoke screen for the major problems in the country. In particular the word on the streets of Madrid is that a dispute with Gibraltar couldn’t come at a better time for the scandal hit government of Mariano Rajoy.

Rajoy and his party, the Partido Popular (PP,) have been accused of taking backhanders and general corruption in a story that just won’t go away. Worse he’s presiding over the worst financial crisis in the country’s democratic history. Perhaps it’s significant then that it is the central government that has complained the most vehemently over alleged damage to Spanish fishing. Raising what was effectively a local fishing dispute to a matter that could yet go before the United Nations.

Significant or not, suddenly the Spanish are talking about little else (well there is one other subject but more on that later.) Rarely now do you overhear conversations in Madrid about the "crisis" or the employment situations of their friends and children. And yet in the same breath Spaniards mention that they know it’s all a distraction. The Spanish wanted, no needed, something else to occupy their minds other than one in four being out of work, over half the youth unable to find employment and a government and monarchy deeply embroiled in corruption scandals.

For many though there was a sense of disappointment that the argument was being led by a beleaguered government and on a subject normally only beloved of the right. So when the national obsession came up with a new distraction the smiles spread.

To many outside of Spain the distraction of one club seeking to buy a talented welsh footballer for a rumoured £86 million seems hardly something that would grip a nation.

Except, for the Spanish the club in question, Real Madrid is not just a football team. It’s a national icon and football is a way of life. To many it seems insane in a crisis riven economy to spend so much on one man. But the debate in Spain about the cost of Gareth Bale lasted 5 minutes.

Because Spaniards on the whole, and Real fans in particular, didn’t see it as a waste of money, they saw it as a source of pride. The reason was for the Spanish the acquisition of Bale is a different type of distraction to Gibraltar. It’s one where Spain was no longer a nation in suffering but one where they could compete with, and beat, the rest of the world. It’s just the tonic the nation needed.

Now all of us should just hope Spain doesn’t think that the Gibraltar situation is another where they can take on the world and beat them. But then they already know it’s just one big distraction, and they’d probably prefer to watch the football anyway.

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.